Soon

 

It's August and the cool spell is over.

Days heat up like love coming back

but you know this lover

and they be like that.

The walnut leaves look tired and dry

like an old washer woman's skin.

The tree's still lovely as the sun climbs high

but no May morning beauty again.

August and the flies on the screen

are in afternoon as crickets are to the summer moon.

I'm tired of tying my hair back and watching shadows lean;

let the smokey tang of autumn bring my first love back--soon!

______________

for What's Going On? ("August")

And don't forget that the Word List is still active through Sunday!

The February of a Heart

 

Here is something from the February of a heart,

cigarette smoke caught in a bell jar,

roses in river ice.

She was dark haired--half onyx, half common crow,

a revised edition of herself,

a slow-fused Chinese firework.

What is there to say now, in too-bright summer?

Her presence made one feverish,

a Vienna of the blood, a powerful champagne.

To be delirious is to be happy, as falling birds are, briefly.

Her smile a trespasser, she owns unsteadily, carelessly, 

one's fine, burning, hotel of the moment.

Here is something from the February of a heart--mine.

One recovers precariously from enchantment,

feather in hand, but sorry the way birds are, when they die.

________

For Word Garden Word List #1. 

art: Gustav Klimt "Golden Tears and Kiss"

You

 

I have a confession to make,

an obvious thing, like a cardinal perched on the back of a white Adirondack chair.

There's a hint of smoke on the air,

slight yet insistent as I still imagine your body to be,

not altered by time,

even as my boots kick leaves gone strangers to the trees.

I still think of you,

no matter the closing door of my words.

A neighbor's burn barrel glows in the dusk

giving only the notion of warmth, across the yards.

The truth is, I burn down for you sometimes, even now.

I blaze, bend, lose cohesion and fall to ash.

Something reminds me of your face,

your October hair,

your old desire,

and I fall,

red and solitary as a maple leaf,

silent but still in love with you.

______

for Sunday Muse #133.

Loves Me / Loves Me Not

 I must now consider, I suppose,
that I have failed again
to do the right thing,
to puzzle out what's expected of me.

I didn't make your bed
deep enough, it seems;
and it's like you said...
before your head full of leaves
and purple-ebony hand on the grass.
Will I always fail you?
or can I fix us, at last?

My mind is a little spider on the edge of a cup
filled with blue rain where in awful dreams I scramble, 
all eight legs feeling in the air. 
You rose, didn't you, to exchange our different slumbers?
You came to me, down the path, softly disintegrating
though my anguish never does.
I breathe for both of us the smoky air of loss.

I have fallen short again, like a sky never holding sun rise,
a pale after-image, watery, foul,
not worthy of this place where grackles strut like Aztec kings.
I have brought the orchid, and the lily
to place in your eyes to disguise my ugliness with lovely visions.
Forgive me for what I have done, and how I have failed.
I am barefoot, like a twin
and will wait here--the least I can do--
making of your rags and sinews my costume of chains and rings.
_______

For Get Listed at Real Toads. I have used all twenty words.

 

Moonset of A Working Girl

"Gathering Wood" by Edward Emerson Simmons

"I said this can't be me
Must be my double
And I can't forget, I can't forget
I can't forget but I don't remember what"--Leonard Cohen

 

Gathering kindling, wearing wooden shoes

is work that makes the sun slip

and the dust rise

in stupid excitement under the wheels of that chariot.

I pull bones like branches slowly

from body to berm

until there sits the new me, blinking,

carefully arranged, expendable, ready to burn.

I am a moonset, walking, blathering,

obscured in a bonnet of overcast and dry leaves.

My effigy with her soft hands rises,

ascends, lights brightly my obligatory entropy.

_______

for my own Fireblossom Friday

 

 

Music Box Church Bells

Music box church bells
over river rocks in a week-long dream;
the rosewood resonance still there come the daylight hour
with walnut splines for the curve of that fine aural wheel.

Music box church bells
in the snow-brush fingers of your gloves at sunset fall
with quilted maple and the movement gone melodious 
was religion enough, and that's enough...my love...that's all.
_______

for Tree Sisters.

Thank you to The Wood Whisperer for information about making a music box. 

 
 

Coquette

I made a thing from weeds and bark
and called the thing I made--a heart.
I wrapped it 'round with wire and twine
and crossed it, kept it--called it mine.

Love my heart, love it much
despite the rot and wasps and such
and when you're done--I'll love you back
to see what nightmares come from that.
_______

for Rommy's challenge at Toads.

 
 

Medea, NASA Wife

Death is the ultimate gravity.
Astronauts understand this, and live forever,
but weep as they work, knowing they can never go home again.

What friend, what doctor,
can comfort the deathless in their solitary endlessness?
What aspect of research, 
what nourishing knowledge
could ever make their exile bearable?

Look! In the sky!
Nothing. 
Woman, you cannot touch them; there is nothing so remote as a departing spouse,
sure of everything and saying so,
all the while

fearing the fire of re-entry
and the facing of wives and waves which once welcomed, and now destroy.
______

for get listed with grapeling at real toads.

Madness

Beautiful One,
committing rabid bloody murder
out on the wind-howled dust flats
of this dismal place, come back.

I have repaired the roof of the Environment,
and gotten some of the circuits to work again.
The hours here are intolerably empty without you,
like space, indifferent and suffocating.

At the Program, when we still had futures
fragile as the ecosystems on rocks that circle dying stars,
you were the only Scottish-Asian woman there,
or maybe anywhere.

I should have known then
that I had no chance of discovering anything distant,
when the only launch I cared about
was of my fingers through the black tracklessness of your hair.

Each heart is a rider contained
within a human ship of beauty and bone.
How fragile, how vulnerable we are
to a touch we have longed to know without knowing it.

How defenseless we are when the right face appears, 
making us feel everything,
or the virus which can disguise itself and enter
without being felt at all.

Doubt, fear, terror, carnage--
these are the commanders we answer to now.
Madness sprung from alien chemistry--
destroying us golden gods of science as if we were cardboard.

Cruelest of all, each infected madman here believes themselves sane;
it is the others who have clearly become maniacs.
Honey, if you have disemboweled Anderson from C Deck,
you had to do it. It was self-defense.

At the Program, our lives and our passion had possibilities,
lined up, sparkling and precious, like gem stones in a row on proud display.
My collection was always only
your warm skin, your wicked smile, and the seeking of them both, eternally.

I hate to think that we have shared our last moment
of strictly illegal carnal sweetness.
What I mean is, if I can never kiss you again,
then freezing under a too-distant sun is no different to me than living on.

Eckhart, from supply, looked so crestfallen when he saw what I had to do,
yesterday when we met in Pod B.  
I didn't know that it would be so gory, so awful,
or that he would just stand there, waiting for the blow, his mind already gone.

The rest of the crew is either dead or reduced to
quasi-human, semi-ruined caricatures, carrying flamethrowers and bibles,
ever-present and ever set on the complete destruction
of all that is still good, and gentle, and ennobling.

Listen to me ramble, I sound mad myself, don't I sweetheart?
I'm not though. We are the last two, the Anna and Eve of the end of the world,
and I cannot bear it here without you.
Come back. I'll leave the airlock unsecured,

to let you in, and on the monitor I will see your face,
like a picture of home, or of our days at the Program,
when madness was a delicious thing, the high we wanted again and again,
and if there were consequences, well My Heart, what a way to go.
______

For Get Listed with Kenia! I used the entire list, and kept the sci-fi theme of her book from which the list was taken.

Image from the movie Another Earth.

Mamba

See the mamba in the little garden--
all the neat rows I've planted show a green face to Heaven
and a splintered white one to the airless dark.

Droplet heartbeats couched in fur and heat
fancy themselves tiny suns, and cross my garden to the mamba.
She receives them and they set, as silent as servants.

Each night, the mamba goes home, and each night
I am so alone that my skin suffocates patch by pore
for lack of contact.

As my faculties wane and the sun boasts itself higher,
I have actually spoken to the mamba and discovered her history.
Between killings. Between intoxications.

She storied me her three sisters, each one green and fine--
the tall one, the dark one, and the one whose lover died by dreams.
I remember them now, and the skins they left behind.

How I suffer at night, when the mamba is away--
how absurd the rows seem, without the quick and the dead.
Every twenty minutes I am born again, more infected than before.

Last night, I gave the mamba a name--Apophis.
She is a black mamba, and it is not for her gray body she is so named--
it is for her mouth, so fatal and so perfect.

Tonight I will invite her into my bed, try to turn her
from her homeward ways. One strike will leave me at her mercy,
forever reduced to minutes, but I'll have asked the mamba to love me and she will,

filling me with dendrotoxin that's almost love-like,
or at least,
the version of it that I learned from childhood days in Eden.

__________

baby devil

Don't worry about me--
I'll lay low.

I will keep my wicked thoughts tucked into the roots of my hair,
and my hair will spread and rise and wave in the wind
like a black prairie.

Crows will come out of my cogitations.
How long will those window panes of yours keep them out?
My Goddess, but they're noisy.
They are made of bibles and molasses,
and they want to sink their sharp parts into your lazy dreams.

Don't think you did anything wrong--
I would never say so.

Still, if I were a scarecrow such as you, I would soak myself in gasoline
and lean into the sun just as it goes down.
That will be your only chance to shine,
so you really should grab at it, like someone falling.
My hair can be your landing place,
full with baby crows just itching for their first disturbing instinct.

They will love your eyes,
just as I did when I walked the earth, up and down,
a baby devil so pretty it made you look.
________

In The Spring

Wolves came.
They did not come to see the flower garden.
Winter's last squall blew at their heels.
They had black faces,
and eyes as yellow as an elk bone.

I was writing a poem--
this poem,
for you,
but wolves came
and I curled myself around the April moon.

I'm sorry if you've come
and not found me here.
I'm sorry there is nothing left but a little blood-
my blood--
on the page,

but if the moon rises,
we'll talk, just as if summer was our favorite season after all;
and should the wolves come for you,
we can still be together, though it won't be the same,
in the fall.
________

ομορφιά (Beauty)

It is a breach of etiquette to use another woman's cosmetics--
that is for young girls
painting each other's new, blank faces
until a woman they can be emerges.

One must never walk out of one's front door
without looking one's best.
Beauty shows respect for others as well as for one's self,
and lets lesser women know
to lower their eyes.
It invites men to blind themselves
on the unexpectedly keen edge
of genuine feminine power.

Having spent the night with Athena,
and with no time to go home,
I went to the SAV-RITE,
leaned my claymore against the glass display case,
and described the things I needed.

"Are you a winter or a summer?"
Well,
it said one thing that a sleety rain began turning to snow,
the flakes collecting in my horse's mane
as we stood tossing our heads and shifting from foot to foot
under a giant Revlon ad.
But that was contradicted by the lilies
blooming white as death,
white as a bride,
around our legs and up to our knees.

"I'm not sure," I told her.

I have come across Persia, Africa and France.
I have killed and I have enslaved
all who opposed me.
At times,
my red curls became damaged,
with no product to be had.
I wore a helmet
for six weeks on campaign
to hide my split, untrimmed ends
and my shame.

In Athena's arms last night,
I confessed what she already knew--
that my beauty is limited
by nature
and by the boundaries of artifice.
She kissed me,
wrapping herself around me like silken fog around an evergreen.
I wept to think
that she would do that;
that she would call me "baby",
and value me
as she does her owl and all those she loves the most.

My skin lacks a smooth, even tone.
I am blemished from sun, fire, injury, and fever.
I turned away from the SAV-RITE counter,
daunted,
and went back to Athena,
where I found her pressing my hand-written poems to her
into coherent volumes.

I raised my eyes.
I asked her if she would rather be with Aphrodite
or Artemis
or Phoebe.

She took my hands,
dark with blood under their blunt, unpolished nails.
She said,
"Come back to bed,"
and so I did,
naked
and trembling.
______